The great irony, of course, is that long before Whitey Herzog became one of the Mets’ eternal nemesis, he was actually one of the Mets’ founders. He was an internal dynamo who helped produce a championship, before outside forces usurped the Mets from the position they seemed destined for in the ’80s.
Mr. Herzog, who died Tuesday at the age of 92, discovered and developed many of the elements of the team that stunned the world with a championship in 1969, and was one game away from winning the championship again in 1973 during the team’s farm days. He came close to doing so. director.
He arrived with a cocky attitude and never lost it. When he first became Wes Westrum’s third base coach in 1966, he said, “A good third base coach should be able to win 16 or 17 games a year with the club.” And as ambitious as that may have been, the Mets escaped last place for the first time in franchise history that year and lost fewer than 100 games for the only time in their first six years.
In 1967 he was promoted to the front office, and with his keen eye he was able to organize the roster of a Mets team that was finally able to break out of its horrible beginnings.
“Whitey was like a wizard,” Ed Kranepool said five years ago at one of the many celebrations honoring the ’69 Mets. “He had a knack for knowing if you could play or not, if you were a good fit for the organization or not.”
Around 1973 or 1974, when Hodges decided to move into the general manager’s chair at Shea Stadium, it was widely assumed that Herzog, who was passionate about coaching, would be Gil Hodges’ successor. But Hodges’ sudden death on April 2, 1972 provided a fateful sliding door moment that changed the direction of the team forever, and the man who would later be frighteningly dubbed “The White Rat” by his followers. became.
That’s because when Hodges died, an unknown front office suit named M. Donald Grant took over command of the Imperial team. Herzog was not one to carefully edit himself, but he once exclaimed: Donald Grant knows nothing about baseball! ” It went back to Grant. So not only was he ignored in favor of Yogi Berra, he was also told by Grant that he was not welcome at Hodges’ wake or funeral.
“The most despicable thing that ever happened to me,” Herzog told me in 1998, on the eve of his induction into the Kansas City Sports Hall of Fame. “I’ll never forget that. And I’ve never forgiven it.”
Soon after, he left the Mets and soon found a home in Kansas City, where George Brett once said, “He taught 25 players and millions of citizens how to play baseball like the pros.” ” he recalled. He moved across state to St. Louis by 1981, and by 1982 had led the Cardinals to their first world championship in 15 years.
A year later, Herzog agreed to sign Keith Hernandez to the Mets. So, unintentionally, Herzog actually helped strengthen Queen’s second title team. But even after that, he took great pleasure in tormenting and tormenting the Mets and their fans, coaching Cardinals teams that outran the Mets in close pennant races in both 1985 and 1987.
“I bled orange and blue in my soul,” Herzog told me in 1998. “And they cut off my head. All is fair in love, war, and baseball.”
Herzog was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2010, but probably should have been inducted sooner. So far, there are no Herzog artifacts in the Mets’ museum at Citi Field. This also seems like an oversight that should be corrected immediately.
